• The EU has denied that it deliberately targets US companies under its Digital Markets Act to impose massive fines and loot the treasuries of foreign companies, which is obviously what it does.  (Yahoo)

  "It applies to all companies which fulfil the clearly defined criteria for being designated as a gatekeeper in the European Union irrespective of where they are headquartered," they said.
  
  "By preventing gatekeepers from engaging in unfair practices vis-à-vis smaller companies, the DMA keeps the door open to the next wave of innovation in vital digital markets," they said.
  
  "Of course, there is no innovation, and there are no smaller companies, because we kill them with our other regulations.  Don't quote that."

  Don't worry, we won't.

• The US government is likely to ban DeepSeek - the latest Chinese spyware now in AI flavour - from government devices.  (MSN)
  
  Why has this not happened already?
  
  
  
• AMD is launching its high-end Ryzen 9950X3D and Ryzen 9900X3D next week, at $699 and $599 respectively.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9950X3D should sell well despite the price, as it is simply the best mainstream desktop processor for a wide variety of tasks.  In previous editions the X3D models traded off raw speed for more cache, but this is no longer the case now that AMD has flipped the whole thing upside down.
  
  The 9900X3D will probably see a price drop sooner rather than later.
  
  
  
• In which The Verge discovers what the role of the vice president is.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  To wit: Break ties in the Senate, and wait for the president to die.
  
  
  
• Only 22 staff remain at the office in charge of administering the CHIPS Act, with any unspent funds to remain so.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This legislation dispensed tens of billions of dollars to chipmakers based in - or setting up factories in - America.  Which is not the worst misuse of taxpayer funds, but not one that is set to continue.
  
  
  
• Cyclone Alfred arrived.  It fortunately declined to a Category 1 before making landfall, and damage and flooding is less than anticipated.
  
  Where I am the rain has settled in, but it's just steady rather than torrential.

• The Trump administration is planning to demand the social media accounts of people applying for green cards, US citizenship, and asylum or refugee status.  (The Verge)
  
  Which is entirely sensible.  You'd have to be stupid to document criminal plans online where anyone can read them, but people are indeed stupid.

  "One way of looking at this is that it's an attempt at basically catching up to modernity," Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the Migration Policy Institute’s US immigration program, told The Verge.  Bush-Joseph, whose work partly focuses on efforts to modernize the US immigration system, said that the immigration system "does not really reflect the reality of the twenty-first century in important ways."

  I'm pretty sure that's not what The Verge wanted to hear.

  Two documentary filmmakers sued the first Trump administration over the State Department's social media policy in 2019, arguing that it violated the First Amendment and hadn’t proven necessary to protect national security interests. ...  A federal judge dismissed the case with prejudice in 2023.

  So perish unbelievers.
  

• AMD may have an unexpected winner in the Radeon 9070 non-XT.  (YouTube)
  
  It's a little faster than expected, and a little cheaper than expected, and it very power efficient - possibly the best of recent graphics cards from any manufacturer.
  
  The cards are selling out and retailers are suggesting and restock won't come in at MSRP, though AMD is disputing that.
  
  
  
• The US Department of Labor is investigating Scale AI.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Scale AI is not an AI company; rather it employs large number of people to help feed training data into new AI models.  Two lawsuits have recently been filed by employees over the conditions of their employment.
  
  
  
• Has Brother's printer division done an HP?  (The Register)
  
  The company says no, but users are reporting that their printers no longer support third-party ink and toner after the latest firmware updates.
  
  
  
• If you need more memory on you graphics card, the Zeus from Bolt Graphics might be what you want.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The base model uses 120W of power, includes 32GB of LPDDR5X memory onboard and two DDR5 SODIMM slots for another 96GB, and a 400Gb Ethernet port so you can connect an entire cluster of them together.
  
  The top of the line runs at 500W, has 256GB of onboard memory and eight SODIMM slots, and six 800Gb Ethernet ports.
  
  Availability is expected late next year.
  
  
  
• Cyclone Alfred continues to take its own time to reach the coast.  While delivering 110 mph winds, it's only moving as a system at around 5 mph.
  
  It's expected to finally arrive around mid-day tomorrow.
  
  Update: Yeah, the winds here are starting to pick up now, and I'm nowhere near the storm.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 08 2025 06:02 AM (NEIix)

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• AMD's 9070 XT is here and it's (read through nine pages of review) good.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $600 MSRP it's a hair slower than Nvidia's $750 5070 Ti on non-ray-traced titles.  On ray tracing it's a hair slower than Nvidia's $800 4070 from last year.
  
  Now a 5070 Ti will cost you around $900 at retail if you can find one - which you actually can right now - and the 4070 Ti super is completely gone.  But we don't know yet what the supply will be like for MSRP 9070 XT cards, so it's not clear if Nvidia costs 20% more for similar performance, or 50% more.
  
  Reviewers have also noticed that the performance is very consistent, holding steady throughout a benchmark and also between benchmark runs.  That matters because a card that peaks at 80 fps but often drops down to 50 fps can feel worse than one that delivers 60 fps all the time.
  
  It's also 50% faster than my 7800 XT in non-ray-traced games, and 60% faster in ray tracing.  It will probably offer worse performance per dollar because I got my card at 20% under MSRP, but if you can't find a deal like that it should look much better.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Apple has updated the Mac Studio desktop system to the M3 chip, with up to an M3 Ultra with 32 cores and 512GB of RAM.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And it's reasonably priced too, with a 28 core model with 96GB of RAM competing with Framwork's 128GB Desktop model.
  
  Wait, I'm on the US site, aren't I?  Never mind, it costs twice as much.
  
  Though it is effectively a 512GB graphics card, so I'm sure someone will buy it.
  
  
  
• Google says to the DOJ, "Please don't throw us into that briar patch."  (Yahoo)
  
  I don't think Google quite grasped how that story is supposed to go.
  
  
  
• The latest winners of the Turing Award have warned again of the dangers of AI.  (The Verge)

  "It might say something stupid", they said.

  I'm sure we'll survive.
  
  Somehow.
  
  
  
• The AOOSTAR WTR MAX is a 7 bay NAS with an AMD Ryzen 8040HS series CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's not the very latest but with up to 8 Zen 4 core and 12 RDNA3 graphics cores it should be quite capable as a combination storage device and app server.
  
  It takes up to 6 5.25" drives and 6 M.2 SSDs, though how those all fit into seven bays is not yet clear.
  
  
  
• Cyclone Alfred has been rescheduled for - at last update - Saturday.  It's just sitting there for now.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, March 07 2025 02:36 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, March 07 2025 04:24 AM (mpgTo)

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• Citigroup needed to credit $280 to a customer's account.  They instead credited $81 trillion.  (MSN)
  
  That used to be a lot.

  Regarding Citi's transformation, the company spent $11.8 billion on technology in 2024, CFO Mark Mason said during its Q4 2024 earnings call in January. The focus was on "digital innovation, new product development, client experience and other areas such as cybersecurity," Mason said.

  They forgot "noticing individual transactions that approach the global GDP".
  
  Two employees approved the transaction and it was deposited into the customer's account before it was noticed and reversed 90 minutes later.
  
  Which raised the question: How?

• It Nvidia's new RTX 5070 a $549 4090 replacement?  No.  (The Verge)
  
  Is it at least significantly faster than last year's 4070 Super?  Also no.
  
  Is it at least available?  If you wanted to buy the Founder's Edition, still no.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Watching some review videos today, I noted that my brand new 7800 XT can only achieve an unplayable 4 fps on the new Indiana Jones game (at 4k resolution with maximum ray-tracing settings).
  
  The 5070 can't play it at all on those settings.  It crashes almost instantly then refuses to restart.  This review notes that in Cyberpunk 2077 the 5070 can only achieve 6 fps at 4k with full ray-tracing without upscaling or fake frames.
  
  
  
• Scientists working on reintroducing the woolly mammoth have advanced another step: They created woolly mice.  (NPR)
  
  This is from Massive Dynamic Colossal Biosciences, the company that is also working to bring back the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger.
  
  
  
• Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lander has landed.  (AP)
  
  On the Moon.
  
  It's the first private mission to post a successful Moon landing thus far, though a few have posted unsuccess.
  
  
  
• Mad King Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the owner of WordPress, is talking succession.  (Tec Crunch)
  
  He's not planning to give up the throne, though.
  
  
  
• Eastern Australia is about to be clobbered by Tropical Cyclone Alfred, which is inconvenient because that's where I keep all my stuff.
  
  I'm perfectly safe since I live inland, up in the mountains, and far south of where it expected to make landfall...  Which just happens to be dead center on Brisbane, our third largest city.
  
  At high tide, tonight.   Tomorrow night.
  
  Update: Actually they have no idea when it will arrive.  In the last few hours the forecast arrival has been pushed out by 24 hours.  That's not good news; even where I live hundreds of miles away we've started to get wind and rain from the edge of the storm system, and towns on the coast are experiencing gale force winds and storm surges.
  
  With northern Australia so empty, it's 50 years since a capital city here was hit directly by a cyclone - and it pretty much wrecked the place.
  
  
  

Posted by: larryw208 at Thursday, March 06 2025 11:40 AM (ZmgIM)

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• The secret weapon of AMD's 9070 XT graphics card: It exists.  (Twitter)
  
  Retailers report they have received more stock so far of the 9070 XT than of all the new Nvidia cards combined, including the unreleased RTX 5070.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia says that it definitely didn't pay for the obviously paid pathetic puff-pieces posing as previews for the RTX 5070.  (Twitter)
  
  The 5070, which launches this week, is not headed for favourable reviews.  It increased the number of shaders over the older RTX 4070 slightly - 6144 over 5888 - but is down significantly over last year's 4070 Super with its 7168 shaders.
  
  And there hasn't been much improvement at all on shader performance or clock speed, so...  Eh.
  
  It will probably still sell out, but that seems to be more a function of supply than demand.

• It turns out that the new RTX 5090 - the only card in the family to show real gains - albeit mostly in price and flammability - performs worse on Passmark because Nvidia dropped support for 32-bit CUDA libraries.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That in turn killed support for 32-bit OpenCL - which Passmark's benchmark suite uses - and 32-bit PhysX, which makes older games run at one quarter speed when you upgrade from a 4000-series card to its newer counterpart.
  
  Passmark tried to buy a 5090 to test its benchmark suite directly and track down the problem.
  
  They couldn't.
  
  There aren't any.
  
  
  
• Beelink has announced its first NAS, the Me mini.  (Liliputing)
  
  Specs are incomplete, but it includes an Intel CPU (presumably an Atom chip like the N100 or N150, which is fine) and six M.2 slots for storage.  Networking is dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, which is also fine.
  
  It's a 4" white cube, has an internal power supply to keep things tidy, and includes a single HDMI port and three USB ports.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has raised another $3.5 billion in funding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company has revenues of around $1 billion a year...  And spends $3 billion a year on R&D.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: William Bell at Thursday, March 06 2025 09:45 AM (VZ4sY)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, March 07 2025 01:17 AM (BIWZq)

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• Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon X2 laptop chips are expected to offer 50% more multi-threaded performance than the current generation Snapdragon X chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Coincidentally, Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon X2 laptop chips are expected to offer 50% more cores than the current generation Snapdragon X chips.

• We don't really know anything about AMD's next-generation Zen 6 CPU cores, much less what graphics cores they will use.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Anyone who knows isn't telling, and anyone who is telling doesn't know.
  
  Wait for the details to show up in a leaked shipping manifest to the consumer electronics regulator in India.  Either that or a Linux driver.
  
  
  
• The Steam hardware survey results are frankly garbage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, I don't think the proportion of Steam users primarily speaking Chinese grew by 60% in the space of a month.  Or any of the other strange results.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced new 10Gb and 200Gb Ethernet cards.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The 10Gb cards are interesting, claiming to use half the power of previous models.  And they're downwards compatible with 5Gb, 2.5Gb, 1Gb, and for the masochists or people whose bedrooms are half a mile from the router, 100Mb.
  
  
  
• Mark Cuban has offered to fund 18F, the unofficial name for a group of whiny tech gerbils at the GSA.  (Tech Crunch)

  Waldo Jaquith, a former 18F technologist, said that the federal government has been a good, reliable employer for generations.  "What the jobs lack in salary are made up for in stability.  Untold millions have been lifted into the middle class or kept out of poverty by having a single family member in a federal job.  Now that’s gone."

  Good.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 04 2025 03:22 AM (rcPLc)

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• GPT 4.5 is here and it's... Not great.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's slightly better than GPT 4o on some things, slightly worse on others...  And costs up to 30 times as much.
  
  That's not a great combination.

• The RTX 5070 has been listed online for $550 with availability just a couple of days away.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But the RTX 5070 Ti was listed for $750 just a few days before it launched, and we know how that turned out.
  
  
  
• New weight loss drugs could be a $100 trillion disruption across a broad range of global markets.  (Wildfire Labs)
  
  Or, y'know, not.
  
  
  
• Researchers have been using a memory leak in the Great Firewall of China to keep track of what China is censoring.  (The Register)
  
  The bitter, bited.
  
  
  
• Another look at the Asus ROG Flow Z13.  (The Verge)
  
  This is a 13" tablet laptop with AMD's new Ryzen 395 Max Pro Plus Gold GTI.
  
  It's pretty good, but with the thermal constraints of a tablet it performs closer to an RTX 4060 than a 4070.

• Skype will die in May.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  May 5, to be precise.
  
  Microsoft thinks you will move to Teams.  I don't think anyone who isn't already using Teams is going to switch to it because the messaging app they liked is being killed off.

• AMD has officially announced pricing of the 9070 XT graphics card at $599.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9070 will also exist.
  
  This competes fairly evenly - if we accept AMD's numbers - with Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti, which has an MSRP of $749, but sells for $899 and up at retail, or would do if it were available at retail at all, which it isn't.
  
  None of the new Nvidia cards announced in recent months are available to buy.
  
  So if AMD's new card is $300 cheaper, and has very similar performance, and is actually available - and reports are that cards have been shipping from manufacturers since January - AMD could do well here.
  
  It's not quite cheap enough or fast enough to make me regret buying the 7800 XT, but so far it looks very promising.  It's seems to outperform Nvidia's RTX 4080, which launched in November 2022 for $1199.
  
  It's a bit annoying though seeing a $600 card described as "mid-range".  That's a high-end card.  $1200 is a stupidly overpriced card.
  
  
  
• Intel's $28 billion Ohio fabs have been delayed, just a bit.  (Thurrott)
  
  Work started in 2022, with the first fab planned to come online this year.
  
  That date has been shifted out to 2030.  Or maybe 2032.
  
  
  
• Autodesk, the market leader in design software because it bought all its competitors, is laying off 9% of its workers because it saw a year-on-year revenue increase of 23%.  (Fast Company)
  
  That makes sense.
  
  
  
• Firefox is saying that its new license, which allowed the company to do whatever it wanted with your data, was never intended to say that it allowed the company to do whatever it wanted with your data.  (The Verge)
  
  Remember that data is encrypted from your browser to whatever website you are using.  If the browser itself steals your data, there is nothing you can do to prevent that.  So the threat that a browser could do that will be taken seriously.
  
  And if Mozilla didn't mean to say this in their license agreement...  Why did they?
  
  
  
• "I recommend being in the office at least every weekday", said Google co-founder Sergei Brin, without a trace of irony.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  "Your weekends are your own", he added.  "As long as you put in another twenty hours from home."

Posted by: Tim Turner at Saturday, March 01 2025 08:14 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Sunday, March 02 2025 11:55 AM (8Wura)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 02 2025 05:26 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:40 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:42 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:42 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:43 AM (NEIix)

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• The low-cost (for Apple) iPhone 16E is here and it's...  Okay.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes.  It's okay.
  
  It's also $599, which is cheap for an iPhone, but not cheap.

• Just a few hours until AMD announces the prices on its new video cards.
  
  We already know all the technical details, and Nvidia has screwed up its RTX 5000 launch in every way imaginable, so the door is open for AMD to walk through, or to slam in its own face.
  
  Update: AMD's livestream is still blathering on but the prices have been announced elsewhere: $549 for the 9070 and $599 for the 9070 XT.  (The Verge)
  
  That would be a bit iffy if the 5070 Ti was actually selling at the $749 MSRP.  But with it selling at $899 and up - when it is available at all, which right now it isn't - it's 50% more money than the AMD alternative and not nearly 50% faster.
  
  The 9070 XT will likely be around $1200 in Australia, so nearly 70% more money for a little over 60% more performance than my 7800 XT.  Good value, though not so good that I regret buying my card.
  
  At $549 the 9070 non-XT is not quite as good value; it should probably be around $529.  Not awful though.
  
  So far AMD has not fumbled this one.  Good to see.
  
  
  
• Nvidia meanwhile doubled its annual revenue over last year, mainly by selling insanely expensive GPUs to AI companies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Certainly not by selling RTX 5000 cards to gamers.
  
  
  
• Several of the old Command and Conquer games are now open source.  (Gaming on Linux)
  
  This seems to include Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Renegade, and Generals, with the Zero Hour expansion.
  
  And it's Electronic Arts that did this, somehow.
  
  
  
• Apple's "Find My" network lets you track any Bluetooth device anywhere.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Welcome to the goldfish bowl.
  
  
  
• Thousands of GitHub repositories that were public but are now private can still be accessed via Copilot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Uh, yeah.  That's how making something public works.  You can't shove the mushroom cloud back into the Demon Core.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 01 2025 12:09 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 01 2025 12:12 AM (NEIix)

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• China is accusing Taiwan of not sitting still and letting China kill it and steal all its stuff.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Taiwan replied "Nuh-uh!" and continued right on doing what it was doing.

• How much will AMD's 9070 XT Cost?  Nobody knows, not even AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company is reportedly scrambling to take advantage of Nvidia's series of disasters - from having no stock to speak of, to having what stock there was being riddled with chip faults disabling functionality, to what cards actually worked to start with going up in smoke.
  
  But AMD has a long history of being handed opportunities in the GPU space and fumbling them with high prices.
  
  Current leaked prices for the 9070 XT start at $700, which is between $50 cheaper than Nvidia's 5070 Ti if you believe Nvidia, and $200 cheaper than the cheapest actual cards listed, but there are no 5070 Ti cards available at all so it may just be time to roll the dice.
  
  AMD did manage not to screw up the 9800X3D CPU launch, so there may be a chance of them doing it again.
  
  
  
• AI has yet to find a killer app to match Excel or email, says Microsoft.  (The Register)
  
  We know.
  
  
  
• The Ayaneo Flip isn't.  (Liliputing)
  
  The pocket-sized gaming device has been cancelled without even shipping all the pre-orders.  If you tried to buy one, you can request a refund or another Ayaneo product.
  
  
  
• Hands on with the new Framework Desktop.  (The Verge)
  
  It doesn't add much to yesterday's information, but they're not insane, so I'll toss them a link.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, February 28 2025 04:36 AM (KOtXO)

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